> I think strictly speaking the absence of foreign troops does mean that
> it was not colonised, just as the presence of foreign troops may
> indicate that is has been colonised. That does not exclude the fact that
> Yugoslavia's development was indeed distorted by foreign ambitions
> (though you would have to note that the principle effect was that, like
> may African states, Y. was, in the Cold War, able to play off one
> superpower against the other to win a degree of political room to
> manoeuvre). If you mean Yugoslavia was a 'neo-colony', you participate
> in all the conceptual ambiguities of that neologism - that it blurs the
> distinction between direct occupation and indirect influence.
i don't used words like 'neo-colony.' they signify more than anything else the speaker's failure to grasp the possibility that an event or process isn't reducible to a repetition, how- ever qualified. put simply: some stuff's new.
i don't think the presence of foreign troops should serve as a criterion, it's too literal, too tricky. how many foreign troops were in guatemala in 1953? well, lots of private thugs, but there was hardly enough of a US military presence to re- veal the truth of the situation. was berlin in the 1980s a colony? there were gobs of foreign troops. neither of which is to say it shouldn't be considered, obviously--i just don't think it's litmus test.
> As to continuity, the continuity in the Balkans, is not really a
> continuity within the Balkans. Rather what is continuous is external to
> the region, the tendency of Great Powers to exercise their influence
> there.
i can't tell if that sounds a more 'postmodern' than it is, or if it's incredibly postmodern. but, substantively, 'continuity in the balkans' and 'continuity within the balkans' seems like a very tendentious distinction, if only because there's no such thing as the balkans-in-themselves. but now i suspect you're just trying to lead me down the garden path, where i'll stumble upon some weird quasi-figurative fountain and then get mugged by a bunch of postmodern anti-postmodernists.
> Germany, and by dint of her all the imperialist nations, are driven to
> expunge the enduring shame of the defeat visited upon the German army by
> the Yugoslavs. Between them, first the nationalist Chetniks and then
> Tito's partisans did what no other East European nation could - pin down
> Germany's blitzkrieg. As long as Yugoslavia was (formally?) independent,
> the Germany's shame had a geographical expression. All other East
> European nations were created by the successive defeat of their national
> movements by Fascism and then Stalinism. Only Yugoslavia liberated
> itself.
this is really postmodern. not sure i agree, but i'll chew on it for a while. my reluctance stems from the fact that 'germany's shame' isn't--man, you're doing it to me...--continuous or self- similar. that's fancy for: it changed over time. generations and whatnot.
> As a consequence, Yugoslavia's national identity is founded upon the
> defeat of German Imperialism. Y's national institutions and history all
> fix the status of Germany as a Fascist nation, and legitimise armed
> revolt against her. And this is an affront to all of the Great Powers.
> In Sarajevo after the war Winston Churchill was horrified to find that
> the Yugoslavs (as then they were) had built a statue to Gavrilo Princip,
> assassin of the archduke Ferdinand, celebrating him as a national hero.
i tend to think of discourses about 'nazis' as less foundational than as a sort of escape valve. (that's a good example of the above-mentioned generational change: if i'd been subject to nazi madness directly, i'd be more flat-footed about it.) as in the kind of conversation wherein party A says X, party B, says Y, and party A then says 'you nazi!' the relationship of the final acusation is variable, often capricious.
> By participating in the occupation of Bosnia and Kosovo, Germany is
> expunging her national anxiety over her wartime occupation of Eastern
> Europe. Now history can be re-written with German troops as the saviours
> not the occupiers. And it can be re-written - monstrously - with the
> Yugoslavs being presented as the Nazis while the Germans are the
> democratic allies.
you're so negative.
> >there are certainly *worse* examples of a multinational state--
> >which isn't to say that it was a good one. and the complexity of
> >the interplay of forces makes an idea like 'serb dominance' a
> >pretty blunt tool for analyzing what was going on. having said
> >that, i pretty much agree with what you say. dominance, after
> >all, can take pretty blunt forms.
>
> I think this is an historical misunderstanding. What you miss out of the
> equation is that the partisans did indeed forge a Yugoslav national
> identity around the struggle against Germany. The 'South Slavs' gave
> content to their common nationality on the battle ground. Post-war
> Yugoslavia was no more a multi-national Empire than the USA is. Indeed,
> for most of the post-war period the important division in Yugoslav
> society was not ethnic, but political: between adherents of the right-
> wing partisans and the left.
sure. but politics is an aspect of culture. i mean big-C culture, not small-c culture--and i definitely don't mean big-K Kultur.
> Growing up in a small Yorkshire Town with a large émigré Yugoslav
> population, I can assure you that they were unconcerned with who was
> Serb or Croat when they met at the Yugoslav social club (a popular venue
> for 18th and 21st birthday celebrations). But the betrayal of the right-
> wing partisans exercised them greatly. Amongst leftwingers too, Yugoslav
> nationalism was popular. In Sarajevo in the seventies, the child's name
> 'Yugo' was popular.
within a few blocks i can go to a syrian dive full of israelis or an ethiopian restaurant full of somalis and eritreans, so obviously these various parties get along in their native areas.
> Nor is it true to say that it was 'Serb-dominated'. On the contrary,
> Tito's gerry-mandering of the post-war Yugoslavia was designed to
> restrain the political influence of the largest single ethnic group.
but, but, but you're passing up a golden opportunity to argue that the very fact that tito gerrymandered in order to restrain serb dominance amounted to nothing less than the installation of a meta-serb-dominance as the truth-structure of the 'scene.'
(i'll start abbreviating here...)
> The greatest flaw in Tito's post-war settlement - and it was indeed
> disastrous - was that Tito substituted the political leadership of the
> movement for the masses. Distrusting ordinary Yugoslavs Tito erected a
> patchwork quilt of ethnically distributed sinecures and political
> positions to avoid the judgement of the Yugoslav people as a whole. This
> multicultural exoskeleton on the Yugoslav nation led to the
> disaggregation of the national sentiment that had been forged in the
> war, pitting different nationalities against each other in the struggle
> for spoils. Such divisions increased Tito's grip, but they led to the
> fragmentary tendencies that finally blew apart with the increased
> marketisation of Yugoslav society following Tito's death.
ok.
cheers, t